Daily Score Blog

Washington is now the first US state to restrict the amount of copper in brake pads used in cars and trucks. On Monday the state Senate approved the final version of the legislation (SB 6557, with analysis here), which now goes to Gov. Chris Gregoire who is expected to sign it.

Copper is a problem because it flakes off brakes and winds up on roadways, where stormwater runoff washes it into streams and rivers. Salmon and other aquatic life are harmed by even very low concentrations of copper -- and the state estimates that between 70,000 and 320,000 pounds of copper are being washed into Puget Sound each year. On the high end, that's the equivalent weight of 57.6 million pennies.

(For lots more detail on the problems and sources of copper in stormwater check out these earlier blog posts: Tapping the Brakes on Copper Brake Pads, and Smart, Cheap Stormwater Fixes.)

The new rules will:

Rain gardens. Rain barrels. French drains and swales. Green solutions to stormwater runoff sound fancy and complicated, but they're not. And I've got a list of rain garden how-to resources to prove it.

The basic principal for controlling stormwater in an earth-friendly way: keep the water where it falls and help it soak into the ground. Homeowners can do that by following any or all of these low-impact development strategies:

1. Channel your roof's downspout into a rain garden
2. Install pervious pavement for pathways and patios (LID expert Tom Holz recommends Turfstone from Mutual Materials)
3. Instead of paving a whole driveway, install two tracks of pavement or paving tiles just where you drive (this is sometimes called "California strips") and leave the rest of the driveway in gravel or vegetation
4. Install a vegetated or green roof
5. Connect your downspout to a rain barrel

There are even programs in Portland, Seattle, and elsewhere to help pay for these stormwater fixes, and there are a variety of free classes to show you how to do LID.

(If you still need convincing that stormwater is a serious environmental and economic problem, keep in mind that in a single storm in the Puget Sound region, 10 bathtubs worth of water pour off a single home's roof. For more on stormwater's harm check out our report Curbing Stormwater Pollution.)

Ready to take the next step?

Washington lawmakers this week passed a ban on bisphenol A, or BPA, in baby bottles, sippy cups, food and beverage containers for children under 3, and sports bottles.

The state becomes the second in the US to ban BPA from sports bottles, according to the Washington Toxics Coalition. It's the fifth state to ban the ubiquitous chemical from baby bottles and food containers. BPA, a synthetic estrogen, can leach out of hard, clear plastics. It poses particular risk to the fetus, babies, and young children, targeting behavior, the brain, and the prostate gland.

An effort to ban BPA in kid's food products failed in Oregon's recent legislative session. Canada last year decided to ban BPA in baby bottles. The government is considering further ways to limit its use.

Gov. Chris Gregoire is expected to sign the legislation.

Parents who want to limit their kid's exposure to BPA should check out this tip sheet from Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Units, a reputable organization of pediatricians and environmental health specialists.

Sippy cup photo courtesy of Flickr user sean dreilinger.

In a cringe-inducing response to my corrections to his memo on the state's hazardous substance tax, Washington Policy Center's Brendon Houskeeper defends his mistaken math.

It’s a little embarrassing. For Washington Policy Center, that is.

Look, we’re a think tank. You’re a think tank. Occasionally, fact checking falls down. It’s OK to make a mistake once in a while; just admit it and move on. Whatever you do, though, don’t double down. It just makes everyone uncomfortable, like one of those horrible scenes in "The Office" where Michael makes a bold, unsupportable announcement then spends the rest of the episode trying to save face.

Let’s review. WPC made two factual errors (that I corrected). WPC is still wrong about each.

Gas prices

In its original memo, WPC said that the proposed increase to the Hazardous Substances tax would raise prices at the pump "by 4 to 6 cents.”

As I pointed out, arithmetic disagrees. The wholesale price of gasoline (roughly $2.30) multiplied by the tax increase (1.3%) yields a price increase of 3 cents. (And that’s what both the oil industry and the state's Department of Revenue say, too.)

WPC "rebuts" by cherry picking: it cites wholesale gas price figures for 2008, when prices were at an all-time high. Which might be convincing, except that:

1. It’s 2010. 
2. Wholesale gas prices are hovering just a little above $2/gallon. And, besides, even during the highest prices of 2008, the tax increase would have raised prices only by 4.7 cents.
3. In order to get to 6 cents, the upper end of the range WPC claimed originally, wholesale gasoline prices would have to hit $4.60 gallon -- that's wholesale, mind you -- or about 27 percent higher than they were even at the height of 2008 summer price spiking. (And if wholesale gas prices hit that level a 6 cent gas tax would be the least of motorists’ worries.)

Repeat: $2.30 x 1.3% = 3 cents.

Unfortunately, that’s the high point of the “rebuttal.”  The rest makes even less sense.

Editor's note 3/9: This profile is now available in PDF format here.

On Seattle’s 8th Avenue South in the Georgetown neighborhood, empty school buses and recycling trucks rumble by. Semis squeeze past each other. Cars are parked on the street’s gravel shoulder amid shoe-soaking pools of muddy rainwater.

Georgetown’s busted streets and heavy-duty manufacturing plants seem like the last place where earth-friendly, sustainable stormwater solutions would take root. But this is the story of blue-collar industry partnering with a green-thinking community group to benefit them both. The trouble is, it was an unnecessarily long and challenging route to get the project done.

The century-old Markey Manufacturing Co. is a neighborhood institution, cranking out marine winches used to tow barges and haul anchors out of the sea. But Seattle’s heavy rains were threatening to disrupt Markey’s operations by pocking the company’s driveway with gaping potholes, creating a perilous obstacle course for forklift drivers maneuvering their cargo.

“It was becoming a real safety issue,” said Bob LeCoque, Markey’s vice president. “We had a couple of loads drop off.”

The potholes are now gone, replaced with two paved driveways and three long, shallow ditches that catch the rain. The ditches, or swales, are lined with sand, soil, and plants that soak up the water.

Washington Policy Center, a right-leaning think tank, is shopping around a legislative memo opposing an increase in the state's hazardous substance tax. The memo is riddled with errors, including two big ones.

First, WPC claims on page 1:

The state would collect new revenues by increasing the tax rate on hazardous substances imported into Washington. This would increase gas prices by four to six cents per gallon.

That's false. And it's obviously false to anyone who bothers to perform some simple arithmetic. All you need to do is multiply the tax increase (1.3%) by the wholesale price of gasoline (about $2.30)...

So in other words, the correct answer is that the impact would be less than 3 cents per gallon. (It could be even less if the full price is not passed on to consumers, as it may not be.) If you want to see the full math for yourself, please read my post, "Correcting the Oil Industry's Errors."

Alternatively, if you don't believe me, you could just check with the oil industry directly. Even they agree now that the price increase is, at most, 3 cents. Not surprisingly, that's also what the state's Department of Revenue says: 3 cents, at most.

Second, WPC claims on page 3

...the claim that stormwater delivered 52 million pounds of pollutants to the Puget Sound was in error. In fact, the corrected numbers show that only about 14 million pounds, or 6,500 tons, of pollutants per year enter the Sound via stormwater...

That's false too. And, once again, it's obviously false to anyone who does a little bit of research. In fact, what the numbers show that the volume of pollutants is likely somewhere between 14 million pounds and 94 million pounds. In other words, 52 million pounds, which WPC thinks is an error, is actually a pretty comfortable mid-point estimate for pollution. So either they are cherry-picking a low-end estimate (and misleading readers about it), or else they've just got their facts wrong.

What's truly bizarre about this error is that WPC actually includes a table from a Department of Ecology report to prove their point. (By the way, they neglect to label the table or provide units of measurement.) But here's the thing: it's the wrong table!

WPC uses the table to make a claim about the total volume of pollution when in fact the table shows only the volume of pollution that is categorized specifically as "oil and grease," a subcategory. It gets weirder though, because the very table that WPC includes in their report shows that "oil and grease," all by itself, accounts for as much as 92 million pounds of pollution in Puget Sound per year. WPC apparently didn’t bother to convert from metric tons into pounds! If they had, they’d clearly see the range of Ecology’s estimates for oil pollution that enters Puget Sound:  somewhere between 12 and 92 million pounds per year.

Admittedly, that’s a wide range and a lot of uncertainty -- which I discussed last month in a post called "How Much Petroleum Enters Puget Sound in Stormwater." Regardless, it’s either sloppy or dishonest for WPC to misrepresent the low end of a wide range as Ecology’s official figure. And if you don't believe me about the numbers, and you don't want to wade through technical tables, just read the the Department of Ecology's recent easy-to-understand summary:

Ecology currently estimates that Puget Sound receives between 14 and 94 million pounds of toxic pollutants annually, which include oil and grease, PCBs, phthalates (a plasticizer), PBDEs (flame retardants), as well as toxic heavy metals such as copper, lead, and zinc.

Let's hope no one takes the WPC memo too seriously.

There is a legitimate debate about whether to increase taxes on hazardous substances in Washington. But, at minimum, everyone should try to operate in good faith and agree on the basic facts of the case.

Update 12:58: For a post not riddled with errors, check out this from the Washington Budget and Policy Center

Efforts to close a tax loophole for Washington's largest greenhouse gas polluter got a second life in the Legislature today. Bills to eliminate a sales tax exemption on coal burned at the Centralia power plant didn't go anywhere this session. But the Senate budget proposed today would effectively end the tax subsidy for the state's only coal-fired power plant, raising about $4 million in new revenue each year. (To find out why Washington stopped collecting sales tax on millions of tons of a polluting fuel that's mined a thousand miles away, see our earlier post on the topic.)

And Publicola reports this morning that this relatively small-potatoes tax subsidy also has the potential to complicate the overall budget picture, since Gov. Christine Gregoire threatened to veto legislation that would end the tax break.

Why would a governor who has come out swinging to close corporate tax loopholes care so much to preserve one? Gregoire and her staff have been negotiating with Centralia's owners - the Canadian TransAlta Corp. - to wean the plant off coal and replace that power with cleaner energy sources over the next 15 years. It seems clear that Gregoire doesn't want to aggravate TransAlta by taking aim at the state's sales tax exemption on coal. It also seems clear Senate leaders want every dollar they can find to plug the state's massive budget hole. It'll be interesting to see whose argument holds up longer.

Also of note: In Olympia this Saturday (Feb. 27), the Coal Free Washington campaign is delivering public comments on the governor's negotiations with TransAlta (which have been conducted largely behind closed doors so far) and holding a rally and panel on moving the state beyond coal. It starts at noon at the Capitol building.

Lump of coal photo courtesy of flickr user ittybittiesforyou via the Creative Commons license.

The Seattle Times is opposing an increase to Washington's hazardous substance tax, for two reasons:

1. The tax applies to hazardous substances that are manufactured in Washington but sold out-of-state;
2. In the next couple of years, not all of the money will go to clean up pollution.

Let's take these one at a time.

First, the reason it's a good idea to tax hazardous substances manufactured in Washington is because they tend to harm Washington. Texas-based Tesoro Corporation, which operates a refinery near Anacortes, is a major opponent of a bill that would increase the tax, in large part because the company is one of the state's major polluters. They argue that paying a higher pollution tax in Washington would put them at a competitive disadvantage when they sell their products out of state.

But consider that just earlier this week Tesoro was slapped with a huge lawsuit by the Justice Department and the Environmental Protection Agency. It turns out that Tesoro's Anacortes facility, as well as several others, was not even bothering to test for important types of air pollution such as benzene, sulfur, and other toxics. In other words, the federal Clean Air Act violations that Tesoro allegedly committed in Washington will harm Washington, regardless of where their customers live.